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Debian Weekly News - August 3rd, 2004

Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Debian's 11th birthday is near (August 16th), and, so several partis are planned. Pablo Lorenzzoni announced that the Brazilian Debian community have postponed the celebrations to August 21st. Holger Levsen invited all interested bodies to celebrate on Castle Hohenholz, 100 km north of Berlin and 30 km far away from Szczecin (Stettin).

Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Debian's 11th birthday is near (August 16th),
and, so several partis are planned. Pablo Lorenzzoni [1]announced that
the [2]Brazilian Debian community have postponed the celebrations to
August 21st. Holger Levsen [3]invited all interested bodies to
celebrate on Castle Hohenholz, 100 km north of Berlin and 30 km far
away from Szczecin (Stettin).

Sarge Package Removals. Because of the approaching freeze of sarge,
the [8]debian-release list has seen a flurry of "please remove foo
from sarge" requests. Typically, such packages are still undergoing
extensive upstream development and are not yet ready for a stable
release. Steve Langasek [9]asked that such requests be accompanied by
a release critical bug report with details on why the package should
not be included in sarge.

OSCON Talks Jay Lyman [10]reviewed talks given by three Debian
developers at this year's [11]O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Bdale
Garbee spoke about community development and noted that people are
surprised when something comes from amateurs because not many people
recognise what they can do. Jeff Licquia described Progeny's model of
componentised GNU/Linux. Jeff Waugh discussed the future of GNOME.

New RFH Tag for orphaned Packages. Frank Lichtenheld [12]announced a
new "request for help" tag for the [13]Work Needed and Prospective
Packages for [14]packages. This tag is meant for situations in which
the current maintainer wants to continue maintaining the package, but
needs some help to do this, because his time is limited or the package
is quite big and needs several maintainers.

Sarge Release Timeline. Steve Langasek posted another [15]release
update. There are still several major bugs in the base system that are
being worked on. With the base system frozen, CD images of
[16]debian-installer release candidate 1 will be made available within
a day or two afterward. On August 8th official security support for
sarge is said to begin with the number of release critical bugs
dropped by 100. The timeline predicts them to drop to zero on
September 1st, followed by the relase on September 15th.

New Debian GNU/Hurd Installation Method. Michael Banck has
[17]announced a new installation method for the Debian [18]GNU/Hurd
port. It uses the [19]xattr-hurd support for ext2 by Roland McGrath
[20]mentioned earlier. Using his [21]kernel patch and [22]star, one
can extract a [23]base tarball and get a working Debian GNU/Hurd
system immediately.

Status of GNOME 2.6 in Sarge. Jordi Mallach wrote an [24]update on
GNOME 2.6 in sarge. [25]gnome-applets and a number of other less
important packages depending on [26]libgtop2 has finally made it into
testing. The only two remaining packages that keep the metapackages
for GNOME 2.6 out of testing are [27]eog and [28]gnome-games. The
latter package will take a while since it is affected by several
release transitions currently ongoing.

Bug Squashing Parties. With the release of sarge coming closer and
closer, bug squashing parties become more important in order to reduce
the number of release critical bug reports and to stabilise the
[29]debian-installer. Martin Zobel-Helas [30]announced a bug squashing
party from August 20th to 22nd in Darmstadt, Germany. Debian people
from Europe and Germany are invited to participate this event.

Versioning and Stabilising of Debtags. Enrico Zini [31]wondered how he
should handle the libraries for debtags properly. The debtags codebase
is getting fairly stable and I'm planning to release version 1.0.
Andrew Suffield [32]asserted that no shared libraries should be
uploaded for binary interfaces (ABI) that are not yet stable enough.
Enrico would also appreciate people to help him with packaging.

Introducing Debian Lieutenants? Glenn McGrath [33]wondered if the
Debian project needs a structural change, and maybe Lieutenants who
would be located between the project leader and maintainers. He
asserted that Debian is more a "team of champions" than a "champion
team" and that it is difficult to change something which does not lay
within one's own responsibility.

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian
package is [45]featured from the testing distribution. If you know
about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send
it to [46]Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following
packages last week.

Orphaned Packages. 11 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 177 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [52]WNPP pages for the full list,
and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you
plan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the [75]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [76]dwn@debian.org.